A quick chat with Jon Seagrave this morning
has got me thinking – we were talking about how dreadful it all is and how it’s
beyond satire and how it’s like the fall of the Weimar Republic and I just
couldn’t find the words to describe how dire it all is here and in the USA.
Perhaps the words don’t exist. It’s something polysyllabic and poly-dimensional
and we need a neologism: what is it?
But I thought about it a bit more when
biking up to Bisley to take some pictures of emigrant lists from 1837 …
A key text for my particular political
micro-generation was Marcuse’s One
Dimensional Man – how liberal-capitalism gave the illusion of freedom
through the seeming allowance of opposition: Penguin Marxism, for example.
But that’s gone now hasn’t it? Opposition
is either ridiculed or presented as false news or simply not reported or
obliterated, and then there is the awfulness of the press and the BBC: ‘The
People have spoken.’ ‘The People have spoken.’ ‘The People have spoken.’
We’re not imprisoned as at the end of
Weimar, but dissent feels impossible today.
And the sense of impotence is, I think,
accentuated rather than reduced by social media. That is the next
dimension - for that once more gives
that illusion of freedom feeling; that seeming allowance of opposition arena: the
trick of One Dimensional People whilst
projecting an image of the opposite.
We need a new word to describe this
suffocation of dissent. This multidimensional, all embracing cat’s-cradle of
negation - ‘Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it.’
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